The Fifth Risk

by The Fifth Risk (epub)

  Get to Know the U.S. Government had not been high on Donald Trump’s to-do list, even after he learned that he’d be running it. On the Monday after the presidential election, the same thing that had happened across the rest of the U.S. government happened inside the Department of Commerce: nothing. Dozens of civil servants sat all day waiting to deliver briefings that would, in the end, never be heard. They’d expected Trump’s campaign organization to send in Landing Teams to learn about what was being done there, and why. The problems that had been Obama’s problems for the past eight years were about to become Trump’s problems. But his people didn’t seem to want to know about them. “They just didn’t bring any bodies in at all,” says a senior Commerce official. “There was just very little attention paid to any of the pieces. The Census—they just didn’t seem interested in knowing any of that. It all seemed to be about trade. Or the size of the Commerce workforce.”

  Right up until early January, no one turned up at NOAA to figure out who should run the place and how they would run it. But at the end of November Trump nominated Wilbur Ross, a seventy-nine-year-old Wall Street billionaire, to be the next secretary of commerce. A few weeks later Ross came in for a single meeting with Penny Pritzker. “He came by himself,” recalled one of the people who greeted him. “I was shocked. Just this very old guy, all by himself. And it was pretty clear he had no idea what he was getting into. And he had no help.”

  He also soon had a problem: two billion or so missing dollars. A Forbes reporter named Dan Alexander, studying the financial disclosure forms Ross had been required to file with the Office of Government Ethics, had been struck by the discrepancy between how much money Ross said he had, and how much he’d told Forbes reporters that he had, over the course of many years. How had $3.7 billion suddenly become $700 million? Three point seven billion is what Ross had told Forbes he was worth. He’d sent Forbes a list of his assets every year for the past thirteen years, so that he would qualify for the magazine’s annual list of the four hundred richest Americans. He’d always failed to answer Forbes’s follow-up questions, and so the people at Forbes who compiled the list reduced the number to $2.9 billion. To be conservative about it.

  Alexander was now one of the Forbes staffers who compiled the magazine’s rich list—and he had access to the Forbes files. “I thought this was kind of odd,” he said. “It bugged me that it didn’t add up. I called Ross up to see what he had to say about it. And he sounds like a credible guy.” Ross claimed the explanation was simple: between the election and the inauguration he had simply given away two billion dollars to a trust, owned by his heirs.

  Alexander had first assumed that the scandal was that Wilbur Ross was hiding money from the U.S. government. But after pressing the Department of Commerce to fill in the giant holes in Ross’s story, he realized that Ross had misled Forbes. For thirteen years. “I went back in the files,” said Alexander. “We [at Forbes] had [initially] counted the money that belonged to his investors in one of his funds as his own money. I was stunned that anyone had let that slide. He lucked into a way to be on the list, without deserving to be on the list. But once he gets on the list, he lies. For years.” The Forbes reporters were accustomed to having rich people mislead them about the size of their wealth, but nearly all of them had been trying to keep their names off the list. “In the history of the magazine only three people stand out as having made huge efforts to get on, or end up higher than they belonged,” said Alexander. “One was [Saudi] Prince Alwaleed. The second was Donald Trump. And the third was Wilbur Ross.”

  The scandal wasn’t that Wilbur Ross was hiding two billion dollars from the government, but that he’d never had the two billion dollars in the first place. Alexander wrote up his findings, after which, he says, “I got a bunch of calls from people who had worked with or for Wilbur Ross, to say how happy they were the truth finally came out.” The former number-three man at Ross’s old firm, who had worked with Ross for twenty-five years, spoke on the record. “Wilbur doesn’t have an issue with bending the truth,” he said. This was the man Trump had chosen to guard the integrity of the data on which our society rests.

  Yet inside the Department of Commerce there came, in the spring of 2017, a ray of hope. In March the Trump White House asked the help of a former senior climate policy adviser from the George W. Bush administration who had actually worked for eight years inside the Department of Commerce. “They came into the Department of Commerce,” said the former Bush official, “and they discovered that it has got this thing in it called NOAA. And it’s sixty percent of the Commerce Department budget. And they said,‘What the fuck is NOAA?’”

  The Bush official flew to Washington, DC, to speak with Wilbur Ross about the place Ross was meant to have been running for the past several months. It’s not the Department of Commerce, the Bush official told him in so many words. It’s the Department of Science and Technology. It was a massive data-collecting enterprise, and the biggest collector of all was the National Weather Service. NOAA also regulated the fishing industry and mapped the ocean floor and maintained the fleet of ships and planes used in gathering information. It had collected climate and weather data going back to records kept at Monticello by Thomas Jefferson. Without that data, and the Weather Service that made sense of it, no plane would fly, no bridge would be built, and no war would be fought—at least not well. The weather data was also the climate data. “If you don’t believe in climate change, you at least want to understand the climate,” said the Bush official. And if you wanted to understand the climate, you needed to take special care of NOAA’s data.

  There was no way the Bush official could get across all he wanted to tell the new commerce secretary in a single meeting. “NOAA is a beast,” he said. “It’s twelve thousand employees and they are decentralized—out in these little tiny offices all over the country. But it does more to protect Americans than any other agency except for Homeland Security and the Department of Defense.” The Bush official did get to tell Ross his main point about NOAA. “It’s incredible value and everyone shits on it,” he said. “The people are great. They aren’t in it for the money. They’re in it for the mission.” And he asked Ross a question: “What’s your philosophy for running the department?”

  “What do you mean?” asked Ross.

  “It’s not really the Department of Commerce,” said the Bush official. “Its mission is a science and technology mission.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think I want to be focusing on that,” said Ross.

  “It was clear to me that he had not thought about what the science and technology meant,” said the Bush official. “He doesn’t have a scientific bone in his body.”

  That was totally okay. The secretary of commerce could continue to pretend to be the Secretary of Business. But he badly needed to put people in place under him who understood the science. The Bush official assumed he’d been brought in for just this reason: to help the new administration find the right person to run NOAA. He knew qualified Republicans, inoffensive to Trump. He handed the Trump White House a list of half a dozen politically acceptable people who could do the job well enough.

  Six months later, in October 2017, the White House announced its selection: Barry Myers.

  Barry Myers hadn’t been anywhere near the Bush official’s list. He was the CEO of AccuWeather, one of the first for-profit weather companies. It had been founded by his meteorologist brother, Joel Myers, back in 1962. A third brother helped to run the company, which employed other family members, including Barry Myers’s wife, Holly. The company was still privately owned by the Myers family, so it was hard to know exactly how big it was, or how much money it made, or how it made it. Staffers in the U.S. Senate charged with vetting Myers’s nomination estimated that AccuWeather had roughly $100 million a year in revenue, and that it came mainly from selling ads on its website and selling weather forecasts to companies and governments willing to pay for them. Some weather geeks had recently discovered that the company h
ad been selling the locations of people using its app, even when these individuals had declined to give AccuWeather permission to do this. At any rate, at his U.S. Senate hearings, Barry Myers estimated his AccuWeather shares to be worth roughly $57 million.

  At first glance, the nomination made sense: a person deeply involved in weather forecasting was going to take over an agency that devoted most of its resources to understanding the weather. At second glance, both Barry Myers and AccuWeather were deeply inappropriate. For a start, Barry Myers wasn’t a meteorologist or a scientist of any sort. He was a lawyer. “I was originally enrolled in meteorology as an undergraduate,” he told the Wall Street Journal back in 2014. “I then dropped out of school because I was a horrible student. I was never interested in learning, which I look at now as sort of funny.”

  Then there was AccuWeather. It had started out making its money by repackaging and selling National Weather Service information to gas companies and ski resorts. It claimed to be better than the National Weather Service at forecasting the weather, but what set it apart from everyone else was not so much its ability to predict the weather as to market it. As the private weather industry grew, AccuWeather’s attempts to distinguish itself from its competitors became more outlandish. In 2013, for instance, it began to issue a forty-five-day weather forecast. In 2016 that became a ninety-day weather forecast. “We are in the realm of palm reading and horoscopes here, not science,” Dan Satterfield, a meteorologist on CBS’s Maryland affiliate, wrote. “This kind of thing should be condemned, and if you have an AccuWeather app on your smartphone, my advice is to stand up for science and replace it.”

  Alone in the private weather industry, AccuWeather made a point of claiming that it had “called” storms missed by the National Weather Service. Here was a typical press release: “On the evening of Feb. 24, 2018, several tornadoes swept across northern portions of the Lower Mississippi Valley causing widespread damage, injuries and unfortunately some fatalities. . . . AccuWeather clients received pinpointed SkyGuard® Warnings, providing them actionable information and more lead time than what was given by the government’s weather service in issuing public warnings and other weather providers who rely on government warnings . . .”

  All AccuWeather’s press releases shared a couple of problems: 1) there was no easy way to confirm them, as the forecasts were private, and the clients unnamed; and 2) even if true they didn’t mean very much. A company selling private tornado warnings can choose the predictions on which it is judged. When it outperforms the National Weather Service, it issues a press release bragging about its prowess. When it is outperformed by the National Weather Service it can lay low. But it is bound to be better at least every now and again: the dumb blackjack player is sometimes going to beat the card counter. “You have these anecdotes [from AccuWeather], but there is no data that says they are fundamentally improving on the National Weather Service tornado forecasts,” says David Kenny, chief executive of the Weather Company, a subsidiary of IBM, which, among other things, forecasts turbulence for most of the U.S. commercial airline industry.

  The closest thing to an authority on the relative accuracy of various weather forecasts is a website called ForecastAdvisor. It began, as so much weather research seems to, almost by accident. Its founder, Eric Floehr, was managing a team of software developers and went looking for material on which to practice a new programming language. He stumbled upon weather forecasts—and a funny situation. All the forecasters were claiming to be better than each other: they couldn’t all be right. “When I started in 2003, the private weather companies—AccuWeather, for example—are saying,‘We’re the Number 1 forecast!’ So I called them and said,‘You make this claim that you are the most accurate forecast: what are you basing it on?’ They faxed me back an undergraduate paper written for a science fair that looked at forecasts for three months of one summer in Washington, DC. That was the best data they had to make that claim.”

  Over the next thirteen years, Floehr collected eight hundred million weather forecasts. “I was curious. Was there really a difference?‘I live in Paducah, Kentucky. Should I look at AccuWeather or the Weather Channel?’” Lo and behold, there really was a difference. In the seemingly simple matter of predicting the high temperature for the day, some forecasters were better than others. None of them was consistently better all the time, however. Some were more accurate in some parts of the country than they were in others. Some were more accurate in some months of the year than in others. And there was no answering the question of who was better at tornado alerts or hurricane-track predictions or flood warnings, or at calling other life-threatening weather, because the private companies did not reveal their predictions of those events to anyone but their paying customers.

  So Floehr analyzed everyone’s ability to predict the high temperature on any given day. From 2003 up until 2011, the National Weather Service’s forecasts had been as good as the most accurate private weather forecast, including AccuWeather’s. Since 2011, the private weather forecasters have been slightly more accurate than the National Weather Service. Still, says Floehr, “For sure I’m going to listen to the National Weather Service when they issue a tornado warning or a flash flood warning. I’m not going to trust right now AccuWeather or the Weather Channel.”

  Floehr’s analysis uncovered two big trends in weather prediction. One was toward greater relative accuracy in the private sector—which of course was totally dependent on the National Weather Service data for its forecasts. The other was the astonishing improvement in all weather predictions. The five-day-out forecast in 2016 was as accurate as the one-day-out forecast had been in 2005. In just the last few years, for the first time in history, a meteorologist’s forecast of how hot it will be nine days from now is better than just guessing.

  Barry Myers liked to say that he was in competition with the federal government. If so, the competition was bizarre: the U.S. Department of Commerce gave him, for free, most of the raw material he needed to create his product. Without the weather satellites, weather radar, weather buoys, and weather balloons, there would be no weather forecasting worth listening to, much less paying for. Whatever AccuWeather—and any other private weather forecaster—might be doing to refine the National Weather Service’s forecasts also depended on having those forecasts in the first place. “If the Weather Service forecast wasn’t there, all the private weather forecasts would get worse,” says David Kenny.

  But the National Weather Service was forbidden by law from advertising the value of its services—and if it even hinted at doing so, Barry Myers could apply pressure on it in all manner of ways. AccuWeather might make any sort of wild boast it wanted to about the accuracy of its weather prediction. It might disparage the very people who supplied it with the information it had used to make that prediction. The meteorologists at the National Weather Service had no real ability or even inclination to respond. “We had to drag them kicking and screaming into defending themselves against false charges,” says a former Obama Commerce Department official. “They never claim credit. They always do these intensely self-critical how-can-we-do-better inquiries. It’s a public safety mentality: they do what they do because they really sincerely and since they were eight years old love the science and the service, not because they care at all about credit or glory.”

  That was the sad truth—the public servants couldn’t or wouldn’t defend themselves, and few outside the U.S. government had a deep interest in sticking up for them. By the 1990s, Barry Myers was arguing with a straight face that the National Weather Service should be, with one exception, entirely forbidden from delivering any weather-related knowledge to any American who might otherwise wind up a paying customer of AccuWeather. The exception was when human life and property was at stake. Even here Myers hedged. “The National Weather Service does not need to have the final say on warnings,” he told the consulting firm McKinsey, which made a study of the strangely fraught relationship between the private weather sector and th
e government. “The customer and the private sector should be able to sort that out. The government should get out of the forecasting business.”

  In 2005 Rick Santorum, a senator from AccuWeather’s home state of Pennsylvania and a recipient of Myers family campaign contributions, introduced a bill that would have written this idea into law. The bill was a little vague, but it appeared to eliminate the National Weather Service’s website or any other means of communication with the public. It allowed the Weather Service to warn people about the weather just before it was about to kill them, but at no other time—and exactly how anyone would be any good at predicting extreme weather if he or she wasn’t predicting all the other weather was left unclear.

  Pause a moment to consider the audacity of that maneuver. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on international data-sharing treaties made on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for what the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.